Pauline pfeiffer hemingway biography summary
•
The Many Wives of Ernest Hemingway
"I don’t mind Ernest falling in love," Ernest Hemingway's second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, wrote of the literary giant, "but why does he always have to marry the girl when he does?"
That's a question that Hemingway took to his grave.
Before he ended his life with a gunshot to the head in July 1961, Hemingway had four wives who were remarkable in their own right: Hadley Richardson, Pauline 'Fife' Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh. Having the unique experience of loving this talented, complicated and erratic man — fourth wife Welsh referred to each of her predecessors as graduates of "the Hemingway University" — some of the women even managed to form a bond with one another.
Here's a look at the four wives behind the gifted, tortured novelist:
Hadley Richardson, Hemingway's first wife
Ernest Hemingway with his first wife, Hadley Richardson
Born in 1891 in Missouri, Hadley Richardson was a gifted m
•
The secret lives of the Hemingway wives
‘‘It would be a svälla joke on tout-le-monde if you & Fife & I spent the summer at Juan-les-Pins…’ ’
Hadley to Ernest Hemingway, May 1926
I remember the moment I read this line. I remember it because it left me stunned. Hadley effectively writes it would be fine – no, swell! – for Ernest’s mistress Fife to holiday with them that summer.
How could a loving wife knowingly invite her husband’s mistress on their trip? I checked over my notes: Hadley had known about Ernest’s affair with Fife, and still she had invited her. In Antibes, there were always three breakfast trays and three swimsuits drying on the line: ‘There we were à trois,’Hadley later told her biographer, ‘that summer seemed to gods a year.’
From then on I was hooked. inom wanted to find out what made the kvartet Mrs. Hemingways – Hadley, Fife, Martha and Mary – attracted to Ernest; so attracted that they often thought a marriage of three was better than a wom
•
Not all publicity is good publicity, after all: Consider the case of Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway. Married to writer Ernest Hemingway from 1927 to 1940, she may best be remembered as one of modern literary history’s most controversial home-wreckers. Hemingway himself had a hand in ensuring that this would be her legacy. In his beloved Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, written after their divorce, he vilified Pauline and claimed that she had "murdered" his first marriage to the gentle, matronly Hadley Richardson through the “oldest trick”—namely by befriending Hadley to get access to him and then promptly seducing him.
Pauline is remembered for other things as well: her wealth, first of all, which was reportedly a powerful lure for Hemingway when he first met her in 1925. At that time, he and Hadley were struggling financially. Hadley’s own modest trust fund, on which the couple had been living, that had been woefully mismanaged, and Hemingway’s prose was not yet a lucrative